How To Cut Up A Whole Chicken
Cutting up a whole chicken may sound easy to some or a fuss to others. In any case, why should you go into trouble and cut up a whole chicken on your own when you can actually buy chicken breasts, chicken legs or chicken wings ready cut and packed? There are in fact a number of good reasons...
For one its cheaper. Do the math and think how much it costs to buy all the parts separately. Especially the chicken fillets that are always the most expensive part. Cutting it up on your own gets you to keep the chicken fillets as well as the legs all in the same price. For two you avoid buying a frozen product. Yes, frozen is convenient but fresh is much more healthy.
Thirdly, you have the option to cut it any way you like, whether you want to make small chops for a BBQ, butterflying it wholly to make a chicken roll (recipe coming soon), cut it in four for Oven Baked Chicken. While you can always use the chicken parts you need for your recipe, and keep the rest for later use.
For example, most recipes call for chicken fillets so you may go ahead and use them while saving the legs in the freezer for another day. I sometimes save the chicken wings in the freezer adding 2 more each time I cut up a chicken until they're enough to make a meal. Which feels like a free bonus meal.
Another thing I like to do is to save parts like the neck or the bones to make homemade chicken stock. Which is something that comes in handy on so many occasions? So all in all if you can cut up a whole chicken than you can do anything (well, almost) So, ready to cut a whole chicken? Just grab a really sharp knife and follow my easy step by step tutorial below.
How To Cut Up A Whole Chicken:
1.Lay the chicken on its back. Pull each leg away from the body and gently slice through the skin where the leg connects with the body.
2. Spread open the chicken until you hear a crack sound from its bones. Cut chicken in half right where the bones broke.
3. Divide the chicken legs part in half.
4. Cut off the chickens butt
5. With the chicken breast side down, divide the upper part of the body by cutting through right next to the neck. 6.Make another cut right in the middle of the 2 chicken breasts. Sliding the knife all the way through to the chicken's skin.
7.Cut off the neck by slicing all the way down.
8.Remove chicken wings by pulling the wing away from the body and cutting through the joint.
To debone the chicken breast to get the fillet:
With chicken breast facing downwards slide the knife right under the bone. Make an incision and with a scraping motion, separate the meat from the bone.
Keep cutting with a scraping motion until all the meat separates from the bone.
To cut up a chicken into 8 pieces:
Cut the chicken legs in half by slicing through their joints. To cut the chicken breasts in half, simply cut through right at the center of the chicken breasts.
